I'm considering setting up a backup and monitoring server which will keep system images of 4 other servers. The traffic will be around 8 GB / day.

What I'm thinking of is what way I should choose ... NFS? But NFS is said to be insecure. Is there a secure alternative?

The other way I thought of is installing vsftpd as FTP-server on the backup-server and let the others push the images there ...


What do you think of the most secure solution ?

All servers have static IP adress so I could do firewalling using netfilter besides the nfs / ftp-server settings!

Howdy,
have you looked at
$ man rdist
Useful if there are lots of small files to update - can keep mirrored directories in sync.
What is the application running on the machines ?
File & Print / database / app server ??
Replication of db's is best left to client/server between databases
Keeping file server replicated could be done thu ftp or rdist
Pls send more detail & we try to help..
HTH
Ian

I just want to backup images to another server ... the image filesize may range from 12 MB up to 2 GB. So it's just a few files ... but files which have a big file size. The same solution should be used for all 4 servers!

Regarding rdist. It's a security hole ... I want to keep away of the rsh, rdist, etc stuff!

I've backed up mysql databases accross the 'net using scp for years, never had a problem. A few shell script(s) plus a cron job or two and that pretty much took care of it.

I have had excellent results every time I've used any of (ssh, sshd, scp, sftp).

- Larry

Consider using rsync over ssh. This way only changes will be transferred on subsequent transfers. The transfer is also secure due to tunneling via ssh.

Second.

It may be necessary to alter the ssh configuration to allow forwarding, auth, etc. depending upon how ssh was installed (from source, distribution package, etc.); the current Fedora RPMs seem to have pretty much everything but remote login disabled by default.

Aside from that, rsync should work splendidly...